


i don't need your voice wrapped in whispers (pushed up against my tongue)

by oneworldaway



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, but not in the main timeline!, in some of which major character deaths do occur, momentary glimpses of a whole bunch of alternate universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 06:47:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3280706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneworldaway/pseuds/oneworldaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We were supposed to save them,” she says, and Root steps forward, close enough to touch her, but lets her arms drop to her sides.</p>
<p>This was never the Someday either of them envisioned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i don't need your voice wrapped in whispers (pushed up against my tongue)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song "The Lucky Ones Who Love You" by Lovers. Unbeta'd. Um, Person of Interest ate my life and I LITERALLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING ANYMORE.

_When Samaritan is dead, Harold remembers all the comments and the eye rolls every time he’s chosen the radio station, and the protestations when he’s set the others on the trail of numbers attending Broadway shows and symphonies, and decides his comrades could use a bit of a cultural education._  

_That’s how Reese and Shaw get tricked into going to the opera._

_“Seriously, Harold?” asks Shaw over the comms. “You let us think we had a new number just to get us to go see_ Carmen _?”_

_“I think it’ll be good for the two of you,” says Finch, utterly unconcerned with how little either of them wants to be there. Reese says nothing, but the way his scowl momentarily twitches reveals he, too, has detected the hint of smugness in Finch’s voice._

_“If you like this stuff so much,” Shaw continues, “then why aren’t_ you _here with us?”_

_“I’m afraid I have far too much work to do here tonight, though I do hate to miss it,” Finch replies. “You’ll have to tell me how it was.”_

_“And if we don’t?” asks Shaw._

_“Then I suppose I won’t be calling Harold Wren’s connection at that new steakhouse in the Village about a last minute reservation for a friend tonight,” says Finch. “Which would be a shame. They’ve received glowing reviews.”_  

_Shaw looks up at Reese and shrugs, her mouth nearly watering already._

_“What’s in it for me?” he asks as an afterthought, already knowing he’s going to give in._

_Harold knows it too. “...They’re very good steaks.”_

_Reese sighs._

 

 

 

_Ten minutes into the show, they’re already antsy. So Shaw ignores the glare she receives from the older woman next to her when she pulls out her vibrating phone and checks her text messages._

> **Root** (19:13): Enjoying the opera, sweetie?

_Shaw rarely replies to the first text Root sends, but she’s so bored already, she figures, what the hell?_

> **Shaw** (19:13): What do you think?

_She doesn’t bother sliding the phone back into her purse, and when it vibrates again, the older woman actually_ shushes _her. Shaw doesn’t even look up._

> **Root** (19:13): I think if you’re a good girl and you sit still until intermission, you’ll get a reward even better than the steak.

_Shaw frowns down at her phone._

> **Shaw** (19:14): Are you HERE?
> 
> **Root** (19:14): I don’t think you can fully appreciate the concert if you’re texting me, Sam. You’ll just have to wait and see. xo

_But Shaw’s never really been one for sitting and waiting._

_The older woman looks personally affronted when Shaw rises from her seat, making no move to let her by._

_“Excuse me,” says Shaw pointedly, but the woman doesn’t budge. “I need to find the little girls’ room.”_

_The woman scoffs, but finally moves her legs aside, allowing Shaw to pass. John watches her go with the sneaking suspicion she’s left him to fend for himself._

_Four minutes later, Shaw finds Root leaning casually against the counter in one of the private employee bathrooms, inspecting the nails on her right hand. “Now, now, Shaw,” she chides. “What would Harold say if he knew you walked out in the middle of the show?” Slowly, she steps into Shaw’s space, reaching around her to lock the door. “I did tell you to be a good girl. I couldn’t possibly reward you, now.”_

_Shaw raises an eyebrow, allowing Root to back her against the door. “Couldn’t you?”_

_Root hums disapprovingly. “No, I don’t think so,” she says, trailing a hand up just beneath the hemline of Shaw’s black dress. “I think you need to be taught a lesson about impatience."_  

_Shaw only smirks defiantly as Root’s hand makes its way further and further up along her thigh._

 

 

 

_(At the end of the show, John receives a text._

> **Root** (21:31): Shaw’s very sorry she had to run out early, and that she had to go ahead to the steakhouse without you. She says to say you’re welcome to join us, though.

_Rolling his eyes, he sets out for his apartment. At least he lives close to a good sandwich place.)_

 

~

 

In the hour between morning and night, when Root can curl up on the right side of whatever bed she’s sleeping in, leaving just the right amount of space beside her, she can almost convince herself that she can still hear Shaw breathing next to her. Just for that one hour, if she lies perfectly still, everything is okay again, and Root’s heart is still beating, not torn from her chest and lying on the floor in a room below the Stock Exchange.

But lying there won’t bring Shaw back any sooner, so Root rarely stays put for long after waking up from what’s always a fitful sleep, lately. And once she’s up, there’s no pretending that things are alright.

Samaritan is still online, and Shaw is still gone. Somehow, the Earth is still spinning and Root is still breathing, and she wonders at that.

On a morning when she finds herself with no new leads to chase, she goes outside and walks until she’s on the front steps of Sameen Grey’s apartment building. The Machine doesn’t whisper any warnings of nearby Samaritan agents, so she heads on inside and up the stairs to the fourth floor. She thinks of Sameen making the same trip in heels every night on her way home from the department store, or a job with Romeo and his crew, or working a number with Reese. Maybe she kicked the shoes off and carried them up the stairs. Root imagines herself massaging her feet, then her shoulders, then moving on to other kinds of therapeutic activities. But the apartment she finally enters after climbing the stairs and picking the lock is cold and empty.

She knows she won’t find Sameen Shaw in any of the household items on display here; those are all a part of the cover the Machine set up for her. The person Shaw really is will be hidden away so carefully, even Root might not be able to find her. But she still looks, beneath couch cushions and behind the refrigerator, and she feels all along the walls inside the bedroom closet for any kind of hidden panel, coming up empty.

In the end, the only piece of Shaw’s true identity to be found here is hidden almost in plain sight: tucked away in a jewelry drawer, folded neatly inside a piece of cloth, is the Order of Lenin that hung in Shaw’s old bedroom the night Root tased her for the second time. Gently, she folds it back into the cloth, and slides it into her pocket, before turning around to leave.

 

~

 

_Samaritan wipes out everybody else. The AI apocalypse happens, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it._

_She finds Shaw on the roof of the deserted office building, as the sun begins to creep over the horizon, casting its light over the desolate city. Root shivers in the light breeze, holding her jacket more tightly around herself. Shaw turns at the sound of her footsteps, looks at her long and hard._

_“We were supposed to save them,” she says, and Root steps forward, close enough to touch her, but lets her arms drop to her sides._

_This was never the Someday either of them envisioned._

_“I know,” is all Root says._

_Shaw’s the one to close the space between them, to reach out and tangle her fingers in Root’s hair, her other arm winding around her back as she pulls them together, kissing her soundly, because there is nothing else left to do._

 

 

 

_In another Someday, Root goes out fighting, the axe still in her hand even once they’ve shot her down. The line goes dead, leaving Shaw alone in the silence of the police cruiser. She gets out of the cuffs, then the car, and somehow she winds up at the Stock Exchange, where they somehow make it out._

_The war rages on, and there are more losses, and something inside of Sameen screams louder and louder until sometimes it comes out in bursts of violence, anything to drown it out. The others don’t say anything, because they hear it, too._

_The night before their last chance at taking Samaritan down, she and John take two glasses and a bottle of Finch’s most expensive liquor up to the nearest rooftop and drinktill the sun is a distant memory. There’s nothing for them to say._

 

_~_

 

John is always looking at her like he wants to say something they both know she doesn’t want to hear. Whatever he may think, whatever he himself has lost, he does not _get it_. He does not _get_ Root.

But when he stops looking and is just there beside her, it isn’t so bad. Root tries to remind herself that they’ve _all_ lost someone, but it rings hollow. Even if she’s one of the Good Guys now, she can never be entirely like them. She cannot trade sympathetic platitudes and apologize for taking her anger out on the rest of them. It would be like stepping into one of her many cover identities, assuming the role of somebody else. Caroline Turing would go through all the stages of grief in the correct order, taking the appropriate amount of time. Robin Farrow, well, she could feel free to go completely off the rails, as long as she stayed locked up. Hell, maybe Samantha Groves would’ve reacted differently. But Samantha Groves never would have lived this life in the first place. And Root is not Samantha Groves.

Fusco can’t even bring himself to call her a nickname for weeks, and her name sounds so out of place when he speaks it that it stings every time. Finally he seems to figure this out, because he catches himself, adjusts his tone back to the annoyed one he used to reserve for their interactions, calls her the name of a breakfast cereal. It’s a small kindness she appreciates more than she expects to, and she has to hide in the bathroom once he’s gone and fight back tears. Even their version of normalcy has stopped feeling normal. Shaw is the axis her planet tilts on, and now everything is off-kilter.

 

~

 

_When it’s Fusco who dies instead, the 8th precinct begins to feel more like a crypt. There are too many ghosts all around them as it is, and John brings more of them home with him on the days when he plays Detective Riley. Sometimes, when he checks in on Taylor the way he has for a while now, Shaw makes her own detour on the way back to the subway station, and goes to see Lee. Most of the time, she just sits in her car across the street, watching as he gets home from school. The one time she gets out of the car, Root sits in the passenger seat, awkwardly, until Shaw gestures for her to come along. “This is Root,” she says simply, when Lee eyes them questioningly. “She knew your dad, too.”_

_“I’m very sorry,” says Root, feeling the ghosts peeking over her shoulders. She can tell that Lee feels them, too. Maybe the whole city does._

 

 

 

_With John gone, they regroup, determined to strike back harder the next time. They don’t lose their momentum; if anything, they move faster. Like if they stop for just a moment, it’ll all come crashing into them. Harold rarely looks up from his screen, and Shaw barely sleeps, training at all hours. When she does climb into bed, her hands are all over Root, insistent, eager. They can’t stop moving because they can’t waste a second. They have to be better and stronger than they’ve ever been, and live more than they have all their lives. Samaritan cannot win. John didn’t die for them to fail._

 

 

 

_It feels darker, somehow, when it’s Harold. Part of it has to do with how they haven’t seen Reese like this since Carter. Shaw and Reese have always been on a certain wavelength with each other, communicating over a frequency Root can’t tap into, and Shaw keeps herself there after they lose Harold, holding John together. Holding him back from the edge. Root has to be their Finch now, coordinating everything from behind a computer, so she can’t go out into the field and be their backup as much as she’d like. When they come home, she holds Shaw closer than she ever would have allowed before. Eventually, Root realizes Shaw’s all that’s been holding_ her _together, too._

_Harold meant more to her than she realized. He was her first real friend in a long, long time._

_And without him there to see this through, it almost feels like they_ can’t _win._

_She stands with Shaw in front of the cross erected in the name of Harold Martin, after the ferry bombing, because they weren’t even able to bury him this time, either. Bear sniffs at the cross, confused, probably missing Harold even more than the rest of them. Shaw reaches down to scratch under his chin._

_“We’ll bring them down,” she says, her voice unwavering._  

_But John is off who knows where, taking his anger out on some Samaritan agent or another, and something inside of Root aches._

_“We will,” she says, and looks up to see more in Shaw’s eyes than she would ever say out loud._

_They’re all aching, and scared of losing everything they have left._

_So she takes Sameen’s hand and presses her lips to a freckle, and prays to the God who remains silent in her ear._

 

~

 

The medal is cold against her mouth; not like Shaw’s lips, which shared a warmth with her like nothing else she’s ever known. She keeps it close anyway because it’s all she has left. She holds it to her cheek, clutches it to her chest, sleeps with it under her pillow. She wants to scream. 

It’s up to her God to pull her back, because there isn’t a person in the world up to the task. Harold tries, and he implores her to keep pushing forward, and not to be reckless, because Shaw didn’t sacrifice herself for Root to go and get herself killed, too. Root gets all of that, but getting it doesn’t make it feel any better. She thinks a lot about what the Machine has meant to her all these years, how bleak the world seemed before she found Her. Harold, she knows, wants her to believe in people, in love. He even uses the word once. _Your love for her_ echoes in her head all night, terrifying her while, at the same time, it grounds her, keeps her planted on the Earth. _Your love for her._ For a long time, she didn’t believe in any love greater than the Machine’s voice in her ear as she dutifully obeyed. But now, but now, she knows the heat of the fire ignited the first time she felt Shaw’s skin, only to engulf her when Shaw pushed her back into that elevator and ran out into a hail of bullets.

The sun could swallow the planet whole, and Root wouldn’t even notice. Every day, she’s already burning alive.

 

~

 

_They never meet. Michael Cole never goes digging where he shouldn’t, and he and Shaw keep their jobs at the ISA. Root reads her file, but they never have any reason to cross paths. Sometimes that pretty face flashes across her mind’s eye, though, at the strangest times. Root does appreciate talent._

_Years later, when she’s fighting Samaritan with Harold and Reese by her side, and the elevator won’t move, she remembers that face again. As she dashes for the red button, dodging all those bullets for as long as she can, her lips inexplicably curl into a smile. Something tells her that she’s gotten there a bit late, but this was the person she was always supposed to become. She was always heading to this room, this button, this bullet. And she was always going to see that face in the end._

 

 

 

_They meet, and this time, it’s much longer before they’re interrupted. The hot surface of the iron makes scorching contact with Sameen’s skin; and when Shaw finally tracks her down again - Finch_ did _say she needed a hobby - she makes her bullet count. Root doesn’t remember how they made it out of the facility that once housed the Machine’s servers. There was the devastation of walking into the empty room, and then there was blood. The rest is a blur._

_She wakes up in a bright, sterile room, downright impressed by the pain in her gut. If anything, she’s even more of a fan now._ Well done _, she’d like to tell Sameen. But she’s been cut off from communicating with anyone but Harold and her doctors. The Machine is, once again, out of her reach. She focuses on the burning in her abdomen, the only thing keeping her clear. Anything but the loss of her God’s voice in her ear._

_After all - they both enjoy this sort of thing._

_When she recovers, she’s moved from one type of hospital to another, and she wastes no time in reconnecting with her old friend, and making her escape. And before too long, the Machine is telling her to go find Shaw again._

_“I understand,” she says, smirking as she pulls her taser from a dresser drawer._

_A short while later, she stands over Shaw’s sleeping form and surveys the marks she left on her skin the day they met. If it’s wrong to think she might be even more beautiful this way, Root doesn’t let that bother her._

_“Did you miss me?”_

 

~

 

For so long, computers made more sense to her than people. It’s why she became Root; she felt most like herself inside these machines, building herself with code, erasing and rewriting all the flawed lines of her reality until everything was just right. It’s easy killing people when you don’t value them, and Root lost her faith in the human race long ago.

It was ironic, really, that a Machine taught her to care for people again. And then there was Sameen, and so much of what she’d come to believe was turned on its head.

Pixels on a screen have long since stopped being enough for her. But as they rearrange themselves to display the image of that dark ponytail _swishing_ into view on the security feed, she’s never seen anything so breathtaking.

She wishes she could reach out and touch her, feel something warmer than the monitor in front of her, but for now, this will do.

Whoever they were in pursuit of has escaped for the time being. Martine appears in the frame, looking only the slightest bit discouraged for the briefest of moments. “Find him,” she instructs Shaw. “We’re not getting any second chances this time.”

She runs off again, but Shaw stands in place, unmoving for a long few seconds, while Root forgets how to breathe. And then she’s turning around, and she’s looking up, right into the camera. 

“Second chances are overrated.”

She stares right up at Root, it seems, for another beat, and then she’s gone. 

That’s enough for Root.

“Hold on, Sameen.”

 

~ 

 

Pixels could never compare to the real thing. Not the cold smoothness of the Order of Lenin every time Root ran her fingers over it in her pocket, reminding herself why she had to keep going; and certainly not warmth of Sameen’s body next to her, solid and whole, _real_. She could write endless lines of code and never recreate the feeling of Sameen’s soft, steady breaths against her cheek, as she sleeps well into the sunny morning. Root, however, doesn’t sleep a wink, unable to take her eyes off her for even a millisecond.  

Really, Root thinks, second chances aren’t so bad.

 


End file.
